Why I’m begging my kids not to put me in a home

REVELATIONS about shocking treatment of the elderly and appalling standards in nursing homes saw me have a difficult conversation with my kids, writes Terry Sweetman.

THERE are some conversations you shouldn’t have to have with your kids.

I had such a one on Tuesday after watching the ABC’s Four Corners’ shocking revelations about the aged care industry in Australia.

It began with a plea that they never put me or their mother in an aged care facility and ended with their clumsy jocularity about sleeping pills and vodka.

The program showed that at least some of the more than 200,000 Australians who are in residential aged-care facilities are living wretched lives.

How many is irrelevant because just one is too many.

How wretched is indicated by the fact that some of our aged say they would prefer death to continued life in intolerable situations.

The program took just 43 minutes to make me fearful and ashamed.

Fearful because, if my genetic make up defies my lifestyle choices, that could very easily be me eating gruel and lying in my own filth in a few short years.

Aged care standards are under scrutiny after recent reports contained shocking revelations. Picture: iStock

Ashamed because such things should never happen in a country that rides high on the hog by just about any measure.

I would like to think that the conditions and treatment portrayed on Four Corners represented a minority of the more than 2760 residential facilities across Australia and that the claims represent a grave libel on the reputations of the majority.

However, we cannot be sure, adding another layer of uncertainty to our lives.

How many residents are left in their beds or parked in wheelchairs for unconscionable times, zonked out with psychotropic drugs, given a lick and a promise instead of a shower or left in soggy incontinent pads is not known. However, what we do know is that some facility kitchens are run on the smell of an oily rag.

It is difficult to deny the findings of a major study of 817 residential care facilities and published last year in Nutrition & Dietetics on behalf of the Dietitians’ Association of Australia.

A major study revealed the low spending on aged care food. Picture: Supplied

It found the average spent on “catering consumables” was $8 per resident per day, which included such things as cutlery and crockery. The amount spend on actual food was a miserable $6.08.

That was 26 per cent less than the $8.25 spent to feed prisoners in our jails and their food is not too flash.

Now people in care are not exactly running marathons or pumping iron all day as they do in prison and their nutritional needs are relatively modest.

However, their food budget is pretty Spartan compared with, say, the average $18 spent on food and drink by adults under 35 per day (2014 figures).

The Australian corrective services system requires that prisoners receive a diet sufficient to maintain them and provided on a minimal budget, the study said.

It would seem that in some care facilities, only half of that formula is applied. More is to be revealed next week but much we do know from experience and from the sort of work done by a team led by Professor John Pollaers as chair of the Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce.

Some of the food offered to residents of a nursing home, which lacks nutritional value and variety. Picture: Supplied

If nothing else, Four Corners’ allegation of the inappropriate use of sometimes debilitating drugs reinforces his findings on deficiencies in training for the care sector.

However, while the plight of the aged should be our major concern, the predicament of their families fairly wrenched my heart. I had to put my mother into palliative care so I understand the guilt that can come with putting a parent into a care facility.

To have that guilt compounded by the knowledge that a loved parent was being treated poorly and fed badly must be an unbearable burden.

To appear on national television and concede that bad decisions had been made and that a parent had suffered as a consequence really takes some guts.

Such bravery deserves to be rewarded with real action to guarantee that our elderly see out their years in comfort and dignity. The royal commission announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison is long overdue, even if it was cynically announced to head off criticism stemming from the Four Corners report.

I say “cynical” because the rumblings from the care sector must have been heard and should have been heeded by successive governments.

The authors of the nutrition study wryly noted that “let fresh food be thy medicine” is “perhaps not the adage followed in the aged-care industry’’.

Maybe it’s time we stop referring to it as an industry and started to treat it as a service and a solemn duty to our elders.

Terry Sweetman is a columnist for The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail.
@Terrytoo69